77 days until Halloween!
There’s still a ton of work left to do. Right now I’m making battle plans for how we are going to create all of the content in time. Unlike FSH, Dire has an A-Z story. Not only that but it has some non-linear aspects to its story. Instead of being a single long loop, the player can choose locations, and within those locations there may be unique story elements.
I have a gist of the story done and rubber stamped by those involved. I still need to write the entire script text out. There’s older story text but it’s being scrapped / reworked into the new ideas. After the script is done then I need to illustrate all of the characters and…
There are 2 main sections to the story, and each main section has a dozen or so landmark points in the story with each landmark having several locations with story and so on. So with a vague multiplication of those things… it’s a lot of content. Luckily a lot of content is already done and will be reworked to fit in, but it’s still also a lot more left to do.
FSH’s release estimate was off by a while but not by much. We targeted Easter and were 1 day late, because we had to wait until Monday to release it. 
I’m seriously going to try to make Halloween with Dire but we will be racing the clock hard and cannot suffer timing setbacks to make it. Even if it’s not made as long as we release Dire 1.0 in 2019 I will be happy even if it’s just before Midnight on new year’s…
I mentioned before about animating pets with spine - that is the plan, but I’m going to test making 3d assets for the pets too. Imagine looking into mini rooms where 3d models of the pets are, and if you change the mouse position (or mobile device tilt) the perspective inside of each window changes with it… I think that would be super cool and I think it’s possible but it’s both a lot of work and something I need to spend figuring out. It would be even cooler if they had idle animations, and were able to react to cursor clicking (like a horse reacting to a fly landing on it…). If the 3d tests turn out well then I’ll commit to it, otherwise it will be spine + 2d assets in maybe a 3d space.